USA & Canada Archives - Page 22 of 28 - A Geography of Reading

Dinaw Mengestu Builds Beautiful Things with a Sense of Place

December 23, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA 3 Comments

One of the things I like most about a book is the possibility of completely inhabiting a new culture or rediscovering a familiar one. Dinaw Mengestu gave me that gift this morning in the novel The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by allowing me to explore DC and Addis Ababa through the eyes of his narrator, Sepha.

Changing Landscape

Stories are supposed to take place during times of change, and Mengestu takes that adage all the way to his setting. Sepha has lived and run a small store in the Logan Circle area of Washington, DC for nearly two decades. It was cheap when he moved in and it’s cheap now, but signs of gentrification are appearing and the longtime residents are not pleased.

It would be far too simple to call this a novel about a poor neighborhood being fixed up by newer, whiter residents. Instead, Mengestu has beautifully woven the social and economic changes of gentrification into the storyline so that the pulse of change in the neighborhood becomes an important element of the setting.

Juxtaposing Cultures

Sepha immigrated to the US from Ethiopia after his father was brutally killed by rebel forces nearly twenty years before, and Sepha’s closest friends are two other African immigrants of a similar vintage from the Congo and Kenya. This setup allows Mengestu to create a world where Sepha is living the American experience (whatever that is) at the same time as he reflects on an almost shared history with his friends. Though they each come from different countries, the game the friends play of naming a coup leader and then coming up with the details speaks to the commonalities of their background, even as they experience the US in very different ways—shop owner, businessman, and waiter. The genius of having the friends not quite share an experience is that each notes and reflects on the differences between them, e.g. the Ethiopian way of kissing as a greeting.

“This country is like a little bastard child. You can’t be angry when it doesn’t give you what you want… But you have to praise it when it comes close, otherwise it’ll turn around and bite you in the ass.” – Dinaw Mengestu

Both the US and Africa are ever-present in the novel as they are in Sepha’s life. My favorite example of this is when he wanders into a park in DC and remembers a park in Addis Ababa that he visited with his father a few days before his father was killed. Sepha’s memory of seeing “traitors’” bodies that day shapes and colors how he sees his current neighborhood and it gives the reader an amazing wealth of depth to read into.

Writer as Observer

It is often said that writers are observers. I am so pleased that Mengestu devotes so much of his observation to how culture makes place. The novel is often quiet, but there is much happening beneath the surface and his characters are setting in place the events that will create the change in their lives (as should be). What is special about The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears is how Mengestu observes the relationship between macro-scale events like gentrification and the micro-scale of people who are both causing the events and experiencing their aftermath.

I wondered at times if Mengestu’s experience as an immigrant helped him see so clearly the cultures of these places. Though his story is very different than Sepha’s—Mengestu came to the US as a very small child—I wondered to what degree his family integrated into their new community and how that shaped his powers of observation or whether he was a born observer. I know my experiences living in Chile as a child and Poland as a teenager enhanced the observation skills I developed as a shy child. Recreating that jarring and unmoored memory of seeing a new culture so quickly for what it is and yet never quite understanding it is why I seek a strong sense of place in a book. It is also a sensation I aspire to create in my own writing.

What experiences shaped you as a writer and how do they show up in your work?

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

This post was amended on July 2, 2013 to correct a factual error.

Writing Advice from Authors Steve Almond and Orhan Pamuk

December 16, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA 4 Comments

On days when I’m feeling more like a book reviewer than a novelist, I read books about writing instead of novels. This writing advice from authors usually helps me get back into the writing spirit. When talking about their relationships with their writing, almost everyone hits at least one note that feels familiar, and I find comfort in the camaraderie. This week I had the wonderful luck to catch two completely different takes on writing from Steve Almond and Orhan Pamuk. Though wildly divergent, they were perfect complements to one another.

This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey

I first found out about Steve Almond through The Lit Series at Richard Hugo House. In preparation for the event, I watched his video about Toto’s “Africa.”

And then I watched the video again. And again. And again. Almond’s reading at Hugo House was thoughtful, creative, and irreverent, and I picked up this tiny, self-published book, This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey without even caring what precisely it was about.

About the Book

I finally started reading the book this week because I had 20 books left to read to meet my 2012 reading goals and I thought I could power through the 70 pages and move on to the next thing. I was so completely wrong.

Instead, I found myself immersed in these sassy essays about what it means to be a writer. Starting with the wonderfully self-deprecating “Potentially Truthful Statements Regarding My Other Books,” the comments on creativity were not only spot-on, they were hilarious and useful for artists of all stripes. The book was too good not to share, so I read most of it aloud to my husband. When he left the room, I read it to myself first and then read to him again when he came back.

Steve Almond Kicks My Writing Ass

Almond calls us writers out in true tough love fashion on the things that make us writers—the messianic ego and withering self-criticism—and on the things we must cultivate—the bullshit detector. But he’s not standing on the sidelines telling us to be better writers, he’s condensing all the things we already know and he’s saying, “I’ve been there. And you really do have to fucking do this.” That’s not actually a quote, but it could be. Foul-mouthed and real, the essays bleed into one another and build toward this fantastic and tiny writing boot camp.

”For the rest of us, writing is basically flagellation, an undertaking that promises ecstatic release, but mostly feels like torture. I will do anything to avoid writing. I hate every second of it. The only part of the process I like is having written” – Steve Almond

Once you’ve read all the essays, you’ll realize you can flip the book over for a quick selection of stories.

The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist

I picked up The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk later in the week because of the author, not because I thought I still needed a shove towards writing. If you have been reading this blog for a while, you know how much I love Pamuk—in fact, there he is, quoted at the very top of this page, just below “A Geography of Reading.” He is perhaps the writer I feel most akin to in all the world—an intellectual who struggles to find his inner artist and who blends politics and humanity in his work. I kind of love him. Mostly I want to be him.

About the Book

I’ve read nearly everything Pamuk has had translated into English, but I hadn’t yet read The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist, his collected Norton Lectures. It was the right size to finish during this reading challenge (I can read about 200 pages in a day) so I stopped saving it for later and dove right in.

Orhan Pamuk Appeals to My Inner Reader

Pamuk starts out from the point of view of a reader and looks at how we experience books as we read them. As writers, we are first readers and all the books we have ever read have been teaching us, but sometimes it’s easy to forget that we are building experiences for people like us. We don’t have to write with our audience in mind, but we should be aware of the effects we are creating on the page.

Pamuk goes on to talk about the ways we blend fiction and reality and whether we really want to even separate the two. He also covers topics like experiencing the world through the eyes of a character unlike you, how we visualize when reading, and writing to the center of the story as a search for the meaning of life. It’s a beautiful book and also very personal. My copy is heavily underlined already and I look forward to visiting it again and again.

“The experienced novelist goes along knowing that the center will gradually emerge as he writes, and that the most challenging and rewarding aspect of his work will be finding this center and bringing it into focus” – Orhan Pamuk

I have 12 books left to read this year, and then I’m going to get back to writing that next book. Pinkie swear.

Other Resources for Writing Kinship

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. If you are a beginning writer, start here. She will teach you that you have a voice and all you need is to start putting words on a page, one by one.
The Paris Review Interviews (also collected as Writers at Work). For fifty years The Paris Review has been interviewing the big names in fiction, poetry, memoir, screenwriting ,and playwriting about what it means to be a writer. Whether you read them individually or read a slew at once, you will see yourself on the page.
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke. Generations of writers have taken solace in and courage from these thoughtful letters from a master to a novice.
The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo. These essays on writing and poetry could only have been written by a teacher who loved teaching.
Other writers. If you do not have a writing group or buddy, find one. Surround yourself with people who challenge you but also get you. I have both a critique group and a writing buddy, plus I am lucky enough to be surrounded by writers. These are the people who remind me that I am not alone, even though my work must be completed in solitude.

Leave me a quick note in the comments to share your favorite sources for writing kinship and then get your ass back to writing.

Pick up a copy of The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

A Portrait of Two Artists as Just Kids

December 14, 2012 by Karen Hugg, MFA 1 Comment

When I was growing up, I was no stranger to Patti Smith. My brother had “Horses, Easter and Wave” in his album collection, which I sometimes borrowed and listened to. Every other month it seemed I’d come across Smith in rock magazines like CREEM and Rolling Stone. She was an exotic androgynous rocker making noisy music beyond anything I’d ever heard before. So decades later, when I learned she’d written a memoir, Just Kids, about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, I was surprised. What I’d remembered of Mapplethorpe came from an exhibition in Chicago in 1989. Intense images, often homoerotic, through a Michelangelo type of lens. So I had to read this memoir to see how these two very different people living in what I thought were two very different worlds had started out together.

Patti Smith and Robert Maplethorpe were Just Kids

Patti Smith came to New York City from a loving family in New Jersey. She wanted to be an artist. Instead she arrived in NYC without money, food, or friends. She slept on the streets. There she met a young Mapplethorpe who wanted to be an artist too. He was also without money, food, or friends, and sleeping on the streets. Easily enough they came together and began both an artistic and romantic relationship that lasted until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989.

After reading Just Kids, I’ve found a deeper appreciation for Mapplethorpe’s work. And not just his work, but his approach to the creation of art. He took the darkness that was thriving inside and turned it outward to produce intense beautiful images. Some are shocking, some are lovely, and all of them are what they are. I can’t say the same thing about Patti Smith. She wasn’t as troubled by her childhood, seemingly, as Mapplethorpe was. She made her way into music through her poetry, which later turned into lyrics as she discovered the joy and empowerment of rock and roll. And it’s her deft poetic eye for detail while also saying something larger that makes this book valuable for any writer to read.

Jumping into the Poetry of the Moment when Writing Prose

There aren’t a lot of segues in Smith’s narrative. It’s as if she’s stringing together the pearls on a necklace of time, sharing one vignette of her and Robert before moving on to the next with only the briefest explanations of changes in space and time. But this is what’s elegant about this book, we don’t plod through all the day-to-day stuff, Smith treats us only to the sublime. Take this passage, which introduces Mapplethorpe for the first time:

“His young eyes stored away each play of light, the sparkle of a jewel, the rich dressing of an altar, the burnish of a gold-toned saxophone or a field of blue stars. He was gracious and shy with a precise nature. He contained, even at an early age, a stirring and the desire to stir.”

Through rich imagery, these sentences embody a young artist with his own unique vision, showing us what he saw, what he remembered, what was important to him. She then opens up the language and shares with us that he had a “precise nature” and contained “a stirring and the desire to stir.” This last play on words resonates because with the earlier concrete descriptions we’re already imagining whatever Mapplethorpe photos we might have seen – and if we haven’t seen his work, we’re compelled by this luscious nugget to explore them. Smith has taken us on a brief profound journey of not only Mapplethorpe’s vision but his personality as well and how those two melded into his later art.

Smith carries this tender, evocative tone throughout the book. Somehow she makes bumping into Jimi Hendrix seem like a nonchalant, sweet encounter or a run-in with Allen Ginsberg an awkward moment that the two would chuckle about later. And that’s another magnetic aspect of this book: Smith wasn’t just Robert Mapplethorpe’s lover, she ended up in relationships with other key players in the art and music world as well (Sam Shepherd, Allen Lanier) while growing friendships with the likes of Jim Carroll, Todd Rundgren, and William S. Burroughs. That she maintains such a humble and almost girl-next-door view of it all makes this story a most accessible and charming read.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Just Kids from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Field Reports from World War Z

November 29, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

I’m so excited to finally be reviewing World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks. On Saturday, I watched the piling masses of zombies and Brad Pitt in the preview for the film (on the front of Twilight) and rushed home to steal the book from my husband and start reading. The rest of the weekend was me avoiding everyone (including the aforementioned husband) so I could read, read, read.

But a bout of food poisoning led to some really nasty zombie/vampire fever dreams that resulted in an equally nasty cold. And I’ve been unable to write ever since. So you could say that zombies ate my brains. But I’m back and I want to tell you about this book.

Reportage

World War Z is my first foray into the zombie lit genre. Most of my horror novel experience was in my early teens when Satanists and creepy toys were the horror darlings of the day. So I didn’t really know what to expect, but I imagine that Brooks’ decision to tell the story of the zombie war as a collection of field reports surprised many readers.

Reading the introduction, the way Brooks chose to tell these stories struck me as odd, but as a Poli Sci wonk, I found it easy to get into the idea of post-incident reports and was interested in the conceit of stories “too intimate” to include in the official record. Some of the individual stories are the victim stories you might expect. Others provide insight into the bureaucracy and military and civilian corps in exciting and interesting ways. So my concerns rapidly vanished and I got sucked into the book.

Creating Unique Characters

One of the challenges of telling a story from a variety of viewpoints (especially when they are all first person) is making them sound different to the reader. Brooks did a great job of subtly differentiating the voices of his characters through specific vocabulary. For example, military folks called zombies, “Zack.” It’s an effect that could have easily been overdone, but Brooks blended just the right amount of character-specific words with clean prose and it worked.

Stories from Around the Globe

Part of the reason the book felt so immediate, even though it was told from after the war, was that the reports came from around the world. The stories unfold chronologically which should provide order, but because you could be reading about Virginia on one page, Finland the next, and Antarctica a few pages later, the zombie outbreak felt like it was closing in and there was no escape. The stories wove together to form a fascinating picture of the pandemic.

World War Z: The Film

I’m all out of Twilight movies (okay, I still haven’t seen 2 or 4, but I got the gist and I’m over it), but after reading World War Z, I can’t wait to see this movie in theaters. It looks like the story might revolve specifically around Pitt’s family and I can understand why screenwriters Damon Lindelof and Matthew Michael Carnahan might choose a more traditional narrative (getting a star enough lines is only one reason). Still, I think I’ll miss the surprising storytelling of Max Brooks.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Deconstructing Plot with Alan Brenham’s Price of Justice

November 18, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Aristotle would have loved detective novels. He considered a fine-tuned plot more important than characterization. Gustav Freytag, father of the dramatic pyramid would also appreciate the way most modern detective novels make use of his five-part model (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and dénouement). Because I write literary fiction, plot is something I sometimes fail at, so I looked closely at Price of Justice by Alan Brenham to see what I could learn.

Exposition

To start a good book, the writer must clue the reader in to what is happening. As this ground situation is set, every detail that will be important throughout the rest of the book is introduced. And like Chekhov’s gun (the idea that a gun introduced in the first act must go off) all the details that are introduced should be important.

Price of Justice is told from two main points of view, Detective Scarsdale’s and Dani Mueller’s. Both have good reason to hate sex offenders. Scarsdale is recovering from losing a case against one and Mueller has a dark secret involving the man who raped and killed her daughter. Brenham expertly outlines the character’s conflicts and all the details readers need to know to navigate the twists and turns of the tightly-woven plot.

Rising Action

Once the reader gets his or her bearings in the fictional world, it’s time to add in complicating details and plot points. And Brenham escalates the action with all kinds of increasingly tense plot complications. These incidents (ranging from workplace politics to a break-in) are closely related to the ground situation. They add richness to the world while propelling the reader through the story.

Climax

This is the point in Freytag’s pyramid where the tension is supposed to be at its height. Although the details add up nicely, Chekhov’s gun goes off, and Brenham does a good job of keeping the story on theme, by the time the climax finally rolled around, I was more than ready for it. There had been so much heavy action leading up to this moment that I wanted even more from the big moment. Instead the climax felt a bit too easy.

Falling Action and Dénouement

Price of Justice is a modern novel, and as such it doesn’t have much action after the climax. Brenham intentionally leaves a few questions unanswered, but the ending is satisfactory.

Characterization

Detective novels on the whole are something I very much enjoy reading for fun. But they often lack the character development that I love. I appreciated that Brenham created more complexity than average in Dani Mueller’s background. Her motivations were unflinchingly straightforward, but the unusual nature of her background allowed for some unexpected turns as the plot unfolded.

Price of Justice is set in Austin, TX, a city I know and love, and I enjoyed how Brenham also used the city as a character.

What I learned from looking closely at the plotting of this book is that it is possible to write much more tension into a book than I usually feel comfortable doing. I need to realize that when I feel anxious writing something, that is not a reason to flinch. Instead it is a reason to follow that feeling and see what I can do to deepen the reader’s experience. I will likely always be a literary writer—mucking around in my character’s psyches instead of their actions, but that’s no excuse for letting the tension in my books lag.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Price of Justice from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.